Jack and Joe, Scunchester's third best private detectives, accidentally stole a time machine and since then business has been booming. Well, alright, perhaps not booming but they've at least been able to make ends meet. To be honest, the bottom had fallen out of the detecting business so they had branched out as amateur archaeologists. Hired by Scunchester's premier dirt-scraper Xavier Hunt, the brothers use their time machine to get hold of the pick of historical artefacts direct from the source without having to do any of that messy digging.

So when Hunt challenges them to recover the fabled sword Excalibur from the mythical King Arthur, what could go wrong? The answer: just about everything. Follow our heroes as they steal, lie and cheat their way through history. In the meantime, Alyssa's life is in grave danger, two old men really want their time machine back and a robot with a headache is having an identity crisis. It'll all make sense by book three...